American students numb to violence

Scrolling through Instagram, one will most likely see something like this: targeted advertisement for pimple patches. Breaking news: 17 dead in U.S. shooting. Photos from a friend’s vacation to Mexico. Even social media has become a place flooded with graphic information about horrific violence, fighting for a moment of attention between rivaling celebrities’ sponsored posts. With it has come a jarring normalization of these events, desensitizing our youth—our students—to the senseless violence the United States has experienced in the past few decades. 

For many, the ever-present possibility of an insider threat only crosses students’ minds during lockdown drills, or when the evening news flashes a headline about a shooting at a different school. But, with a culture more infatuated than ever with violence, the integration of these drills into our curriculums, and the mounting frequency of these news stories, this worry has become difficult to ignore. Some have become accustomed to the thought, no matter how small, that each time they walk into school, there’s a possibility it could be the last time. 

“I wouldn’t say that walking the halls every day that I’m, like, overly anxious,” Laura Ray, 12 said. “But I do have that thought in the back of my mind, always.” 

And even for those who aren’t actively worried about their safety within the school building, their subconscious response to this epidemic of violence is just as alarming. Following the shooting at Oxford High School on November 30, 2021, our own high school was threatened via a note scrawled in the boys’ bathroom on December 7. Already shaken by the proximity of the Oxford shooting, our student body reacted in different ways. Some, like Laura, feared for their safety. 

Others, however, viewed it simply as an opportunity to leave school early. Laughing on their way out the doors, unable to grasp the gravity of the situation, because it’s nothing new for students of American schools. 

Maddy de Foras, 9, attended school in Milan, Italy for over nine years. Like in many European countries, Italy doesn’t provide its citizens a fundamental right to bear arms, unlike the United States. Ownership and usage are heavily regulated, as well as the type of firearms citizens are allowed to own.  

“The first time I heard of a school shooting was, like, on the news somewhere [in the U.S.] and it was very disturbing,” Maddy said. “If you don’t grow up around that kind of thing, it’s just, like, why?” 

The reality is that American society has become desensitized to gun violence, which, in turn, means its children have too. Children and teens today witness excessive amounts of gun violence, both in real-life and in media, and it has caused a decrease in psychological reaction to this violence, according to the article “Emotional and Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life and Movie Violence”, written by psychology professor Sylvie Mrug, and published by PubMed. 

“My peers tend to kind of analyze [events of gun violence], and I feel like I’m more emotionally connected to them,” Maddy said. Having grown up without the looming presence of such events, Maddy has not been desensitized to gun violence in the way many of her American peers have. 

Though this problem does not begin or end within their cinder block walls, schools have shined a spotlight on this desensitization. The casual normalcy of practicing how to hide from a school shooter, instilled in us for as long as the ABCs; the sobering discussions within classrooms about the ‘if’s and the ‘whens’; the underlying anxiety that comes with walking in each morning. These things are not normal, but they have become normalized, desensitizing our students within places meant for education.